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New features: The thing The other thing That This Possibly that thing over there Post any bugs you experience in this thread. Thanks!

Adding Eng VAs is even more insulting than censoring games.

Nah. It's a feature.

Another day, another deep dive into the esoterica of visual novel punctuation. Next on our chopping block: the wave dash ( 〜 ), which looks an awful lot like the Western tilde (~) but functions nothing like it. Our refrain here is a familiar one: the wave dash has no place in well-localized English VNs and should be removed or replaced wherever possible. No ifs, no ands, but one very small but. How 〜 functions in Japanese The wave dash has several fairly pedestrian functions in written Japanese, including separating ranges of values, which is handled by the en-dash (–) in English; denoting geographic origins; and separating title from subtitle, which is handled by the colon in English (e.g., Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo). These are all fairly boring, however, and if you’re an editor, your translator should already have converted such wave dashes to their Western equivalents. Where things get interesting, and by “interesting” I mean “annoying,” is when we start looking at some more colloquial uses that pop up in translated VNs with alarming frequency. The wave dash can be used to elongate and modulate a vowel sound, much like the long vowel mark (ー) in katakana. You’ll sometimes find 〜 applied to the end of a word, and it’s implied that this longer sound is audibly “brighter.” Terms like “uptalk,” “vibrato/tremolo,” “kawaii” and “girlish” get thrown around a lot. (Think of the stereotypically perky “Ohayooooo” morning greeting you often hear in VNs or anime.) It’s usually a deliberate choice by the character, done to sound cute, funny, etc.. The wave dash can also be added to the end of a sentence to suggest the entire line should be read with that same brighter inflection – a happy sing-song of sorts. Or sometimes, it can signify literal musicality, as in the line should actually be sung. “Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day〜 ” Less frequently, and usually in the context of digital communications, the wave dash can be used to suggest that a word or sentence should be read as being ironic/sarcastic. “Oh great. What a beautiful morning 〜 ” As you can see, there are a bunch of possible readings of any given wave dash, and the correct interpretation depends largely on textual and cultural context. Add in the fact that 〜 is non-standard English punctuation that your average non-otaku isn't familiar with (never mind its various nuances), and it seems like a no-brainer to dump it and convey the intended meaning in clean, clear English instead. But no. For some fecking reason, VNs are littered with these fecking squigglers. They’re fecking everywhere, like that scene in The Lost Boys where one of the Coreys, I don’t know which goddamn one, starts eating a takeout container of lo mein but Kiefer Sutherland or some other vampire guy gets all vampirey and is like, “Nuh-uh, Corey” and that selfsame Corey suddenly looks down and his delicious noodles have turned into thousands of these wriggling, white maggots and he can’t vom fast enough. It’s literally like that. Literally. The answer? Get rid of them. Do your readers a kindness and remove wave dashes wherever you encounter them. If your translator has done their job right, you’ll have all the context you need to turn those dashes into well-formed English that anyone can understand. That doesn’t always mean stretching out the last letters preceding the wave dash, mind you. That ways lies disasteeeeeer. All you need to do is ask yourself one simple question: How would it sound natural if a native English-speaker rephrased this line? That’s it! Let’s look at some examples. The easiest is where the English usage matches the Japanese, such as stretching out a vowel. So imagine a character walks into a dark and spooky house, then calls out to see if anyone’s home. What about cute inflections? Well, English is a rich language; there are plenty of ways to make a sentence sound perkier: There’s no magic formula, and it's not rocket science. It's just sitting down and rewriting. And if you’re doing your job as an editor, you should pretty much be rewriting every single line anyway, so it’s no added hardship. The one, small exception If you remember, I mentioned digital communications a little earlier. This is the one place where I’d recommend you let a sleeping wave dash lie. Typographical oddities (such as emoticons) are part and parcel of the electronic vernacular, so it feels much more natural to let them stay in a text or an IM that’s being quoted verbatim. You want your reader to feel like they’re seeing exactly what the character has on their screen. Just make sure you’ve edited these lines so the English meaning will still be clear if the wave dashes were removed. After all, there’s a world of difference between “Great advice, Darbury 〜 ” and “Great advice, Darbury 〜 ”

Hello guys, I'm Steve Casalgrandi official writer Elisa Project: The Innkeeper. We noticed the presence of a post this in your forum made by one of our fans, but we have seen that the latter does not keep him up to date, so we felt the need to create an official, considering the many changes which are made in 'last period. before you start reading, I would like to point out that our prequel is available free of Steam and that there is a Kickstarer campaign. the links below you can find them when you're not exposing part of our work. Our Visual Novel has as its protagonist Elisa, a charming and beautiful girl who is struggling with the amorous proposals of a prince, a merchant and a knight. Characters Our goal is to offer you a thrilling and interactive story where the choices you make will have the power to influence in a negative way or a positive history and give you a chance to unlock items that you can choose to use or not. Our prequel represents 20% of the full game and is divided into 3 main branches. We want to open this thread to talk openly with you our product, and to know what you think of the work we are doing. We recently added various things in our prequel including: The unlockable objectives, the car mode, the Steam cards and much more, plus we confirmed the 18+ version and the new art that will be inserted permanently in the game final. In any successful project it is behind an audience that follows him and that supports it, there is no game without players, so we are eager to hear your opinion on our visual novel. If you decide to play in our prequel does not hesitate to tell us what you think by writing a review on the forum or steam! below place the most important link! Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/472680/ Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2044603064/elisa-the-innkeeper/description A greeting and a thank you to the whole team! ^-^

@Vorathiel Your argument of "I can't make good choices, therefore these choices should be made for me" isn't very convincing. Especially when your solution is to remove the choice for everyone.

Sepia Tears Still to this day my favorite OELVN, but it hardly gets talked about or coverage of any form And Myra still has one of the best character designs I've seen in VNs

vs

Gesshou ~Tsuki no Terasu~ and Blue* , 2 small doujin VNs with a lot of heart. Perfect for those little moments where you just wanna relax and enjoy some small stories and they're both actually pretty touching when you're done with them.

That other thing isn't working, revert pls

One of the reasons that SP gets some "impossible" licenses is that other VN companies turned them down when they learn that they won't be allowed to release non mosaiced releases, while SP doesn't. Giga is specifically one of these companies. Rumor has it, JAST was in talks to license the Giga title Kingdom but walked away from the deal because JAST is pretty hardline on their "no mosaics or no release" stance. If they did have a more flexible approach to mosaics, we'd probably have had Baldr Sky in English years ago, lol.

Now there's a joyful thought. Someone needs to get into contact with Dovac, ASAP!

Yes. Since I can't understand the language, visual novels will always be more of a reading experience than an auditory one for me anyway. If the dub were extremely bad, I can just turn it off/play it without sound. I wouldn't let something like an English only dub deter me from reading a VN I was looking forward to. That said, there's some cues (and humor) that can usually be gotten from the tone and cadence of the original VA, so it's not like its completely removed from the experience of reading a visual novel altogether - it's just not essential to me.

Basically it means he only listens to consumers, and that's a reasonable position for every business to take. If we listened to the die-hard VN fan, a lot of what localisers would bring over is chuuni titles, and yet we now know from MG that's not a very profitable route to take. Yeah, publishers and/or management will dictate where a writer takes a title, not the writer. Unless they're in Indie, of course. It's a well known tale of woe from developers.

tbh, this with italian voice acting would be amazing

He didn't ask for anyone's opinion of Key I hate to have to phrase it this way, but if you don't have anything nice to say, just don't say anything As an answer to the question, I've seen more than one fan theory about key games sharing universes, but I think it's mostly just due to Maeda's writing style. here's a similar thread on /r/ https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/19kn43/dumb_fantheory_all_key_vns_are_in_the_same/

Give me HuniePop tier VA and I'd be fine with that.

Remember11 is criminally underrated. Ever17 (its indirect precedessor) is far more popular, but Remember11 does practically everything it tries better than Ever17 save for the ending and even that is debatable. Atmosphere, pacing, characters, plot- R11 is just better at everything and I say this as someone who has both VNs in his top 5 VNs of all time. edit: There's also the fact that Remember11 is exceptionally devoid of romance for a VN while Ever17's mostly reliant on heroine-based routes to progress the story. I'm not saying romance is an inherently bad thing -hell, Ever17's Sora route is probably my favorite arc in any VN and definitely my favorite romance in anything- but I think it contributed to Ever17's popularity.

The idea here is to weed out the Sekai Project haters who wouldn't buy anything from them no matter what. People willing to register on their site and voice their opinion are more likely to actually buy the game if their demands are met. These are the people Sekai Project and GIGA are most likely to listen to. Not to mention Sekai Project can monitor the voting and ensure that the poll results aren't rigged. Therefore the message sent is stronger even if the number of votes is fewer.

Is the 'thing' that 'thing' I'm thinking about? If so, pls revert. I don't want Fuwa to become another one of those eldritch abominations.

Umm... if I had to make a suggestion... Harumade Kururu. Edit: A suggestion: what you are looking for might be 'genre shift' in tags on vndb. Yumina is the only one that fits in the translated VNs, I think.

A lot of us want an 18+ patch. So we better try these simple methods at least to attempt to get what we want. I know its a pain in the ass registering for sites, but just go and vote. We don't want to be hypocrites now do we? Also, might as well vote in the other polls for games you want in 18+ while you're there. Now and in the future. Ps: thanks for putting up the poll mate

We still haven't been told to riot, and I'm therefore still panicking.

If any of you were wondering, yes this is a propaganda piece.

Yes, indeed, so I hope no more ZE will happen. Uchi should do something else, really.

@Rooke's crappy default theme is the only theme in which the PM box works for me. Fuwafab: Rooke's crappy theme being functional cannot possibly be working as intended. Please break that one, too.

Ya know. isn't there still another Con?

I'm far away from 'major civiliation', with shitty internet conenction, but I just had to log in. Cause all this butthurt for 18+ baldr made me uncomfortable. It seems like majority of you people are what's wrong with the world, and it's because of you, and your japanesse equivalents, that visual novel market is so shitty. I'm soooo glad for only 'no h' version of Baldr. Why? Because I'm a weak person. If I would have a choice - play full +18 game, or to play an 'forced all ages', I would choose +18. Only because it's the 'full experience' and I like to watch/read/enjoy art in form that authors intended (that's why I hate any dubs, or cropping ratios, or overly localised transaltions etc). But I know I would like censored version much, much better. I hate h scenes in non nukige games. I hate all those character breaking (f.e dominant Kagome from Comyu), mood crushing (mainly Cartagra, but 90% of vns could fit here), and over the top, silly, totally non realsitic, multi cumming bullshit they provide (every VN I've read with porn, except for maybe Katawa Shoujo). H scenes are ruining my experience from almost any game. So, yeah, I'm glad. Sucks for you all fappers, but I'm glad. I'm glad that I will not have to choose, and I'll be forced to play a much better version of Balrd Sky. All hail Sekai Project, all hail censorship of plot based, non nukige visual novels. I hope they will stay with their decision of not giving any porn filled version of this game. Visual Novels are ultimate medium, provides all that's best in movies and books combined. And yet it's polluted with shitty, completly unnecessary porn that ruins any experience.

At least the game is not placed in a Japanese High School, or any other "wannabe japanese" settings.

But there's no subs lol.

Not getting access or restoration to R18+ content means CONCEDING TO CENSORSHIP. And EVERYONE fucking hates censorship in VNs. Getting feedback from Steam users is like getting feedback from 3 year olds. Most of them are imbeciles to the VN medium. They should be going here or other serious VN forums for feedback.

considering the fact the vast majority of eng-dub features homeless bums that got dragged into doing their part for the sake of maximizing profit, i´d clearly say thanks for nothing.

How stupid can you be!? Incidentally, I don't quite know how I'd go about voting either.

The eyes look a little wonky in certain pictures, but I'm pretty critical about eyes Good job, this shows great promise for an OELVN, keeping an eye out for this

VA-11 HALL-A. It's practically a visual novel. A great read with great art and music.

Continuing: I honestly wouldn’t use it in prose anyway. It doesn’t modify English prose in any way, it’s just a short cut for a word, which comes across as lazy. You may as well start typing sections in shorthand. Also, sticking a math symbol in the middle of a piece of fiction tends to jolt readers out of the story. You don’t have space limitations in a novel, so you're better off just typing the word. Similarly I wouldn’t use it in dialogue. It doesn’t modify the tone of what was said in any way (in English) and again it’s a short cut for a word. The above criticisms still apply. Like Darbury said, the only place I’d use it is when you’re replicating the appearance of something which was written. Otherwise I don’t see the purpose of it, TBH.

giving exact percentages up to 2 digits after the comma Doesnt look too bad. Also, did you forget to add an VNDB link?

All I know is that one of the heroines has "Tentacles(consensual)" as a tag on VNDB. I expect greatness.

Let's pray that one thing* isn't include in the list of this, thats, and the thing, and that other thing, and possibly that thing over there *rollback

You mean it's not just, "You're tearing me up," "Your hot cum is melting my pussy," "Let's cum together," and "It hurts but since it's you I don't mind" ???

I just need to learn all the nasty and foul language for the h-scenes and my Japanese should be solid.

Step 1: Obtain Zero Escape: VLR watch Step 2: Get ripped forearms like Sigma Step 3: Convince onee-san to go to Real Zero Escape in LA with me Step 4: Convince onee-san to cut hair short, and dye white Step 5: Pray I don't get ganked by Clover

Looks A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!

Artist: http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=512849&from_sid=1752781004

Guys, please. Clearly, the best h-scene in the world - no, in the entire universe - is the thrilling bicycle piss marathon from SubaHibi. It isn't hot, it is insufferably long and it makes no fucking sense at all, but even so (or maybe exactly because of that), it is a masterpiece and an achievement in story telling that shall never be matched, ever.

Uh, what's up with ppl on steam reviewing the game without even reading it? The top review sounds like they played a Sakura game or something. So misleading. T_T

I see the inclusion of 「」 Japanese quotation marks as simply an extension of fan translation weabooism that thinks including as much Japanese in the translation as possible makes it somehow more authentic.